PCAPPC

The Greek word, “geo”, like the Germanic word, “earth”, probably meant the hard, flat surface, the dirt and rocks beneath the dome of the heavens. The Greek “cosmos”, the German “world,” and the Latin word from which “ecumenical” originates, were words for the inhabited earth, the ordered and rational which we'd managed to wrestle from the unconscious void, the chaos beyond our borders. Geometry is a Roman word, not a Greek one, and they used it to mean the measure of the civilized world, the boundaries and boxes, the walls behind which order was maintained and preserved. Pythagoras didn't have a word for geometry. Instead, he used the words for number from which “arithmetic” originates, and learning , which was the original meaning of “mathematics”. Ancient Greece had no use for geometry in the Roman sense. Their domain was a cosmos of water surrounding islands which each functioned as independent worlds. “Cosmos” comes from the Greek, and the Romans seemed to have little...

Our neurology rewards us for relinquishing control, and we're punished for resisting. Survival requires the group be favored over the individual, but consciousness isn't easily assimilated. If in childhood the culture is unambiguous and stable, our world view is naturally entangled with the group's and we're easily indoctrinated. The same easy assimilation can occur when we're raised to be multicultural. But when the cultures are in conflict, the legitimacy of them all is questioned, and we grow up to be skeptics, believers in nothing, resistant to assimilation. We're not alone, as John Lennon noted, but we are isolated.

Are psychopaths autonomous agents of their personal ambitions? Are they thoroughly independent of the identities which the rest of us, as tame as sheep, have adopted without question?  The question is rhetorical because the answer is unquestionably, No. If anything, the psychopath is the very archetype of group identity. He or she embodies the culture, the country, or the creed, without suffering the inconvenience of an individual conscience or the indignity of doubt.  Sociopaths, on the other hand, disregard group identification and construct their own, idiosyncratic and narcissistic identities. Whatever family or tribe a sociopath might recognize would be synonymous with a cult, home-schooled and incestuous. At best, the sociopath is a critic of the psychopath's unwavering defense of empire, while the psychopath is, at best, the charismatic leader of a broadly unifying ideological identity (racial, religious, national, economic, etc.), and a critic of those cultist id...